What is the Average ACT Score?

What is the Average ACT Score?

The average ACT score is 20. In other words, 20 is the median composite score. About half of the nation’s test takers score above 20, and about half score below.

ACT Category

Score

Average ACT Composite score

20

Average ACT English score

19

Average ACT Math score

19

Average ACT Reading score

20

Average ACT Science score

20

The Design Target Average ACT Score

The ACT scoring scale is designed so that 18 is the average ACT score. The English, Math, Reading, and Science are also designed for an average score of 18, on a range from 1 to 36. A standard deviation on any section is designed to correspond to 6 points.

Why Does the Actual Average ACT Score differ From the Target?

Because the ACT strives to stay consistent over time, the true average ACT score has some drift. This is because every ACT test is different, and some tests are easier than others. To account for this, the ACT sometimes includes a fifth section that was previously given on a prior ACT. ACT then uses performance on that section to determine how easy or difficult a new ACT test actually is and assign scores accordingly. This is what allows takers of the October ACT to compare their scores to takers of the November ACT.

True ACT Performance is Measured by Percentile

The average ACT score is not an important metric for college applicants. A more precise indicator is the percentile where you rank. Percentile is a way of indicating the percentage of students who perform worse than you on the ACT. If you scored exactly average on the ACT, then you would say that you had a 50 percentile score. In other words, you perform better than 50%, or half, of all the students who take the ACT.

What if you improve your score another 2 points? Then what? Your score is no longer average, so you need a new metric. That better metric is your percentile score. What you can look up is that if you scored an 22 composite score instead of a 20 composite score, you would now be scoring at the 63rd percentile across all test takers, meaning you are now performing better than 63 percent of all test-takers.

How to Look Up Your ACT Score Percentile

To determine how good your ACT score is, the most straight forward thing to do is look up your percentile. Your percentile will tell you the percentage of test takers who performed worse than you. If you have a 99th percentile score, that means that 99 out of 100 test takers performed worse than you on the ACT.

You need a lookup table to calculate your percentile score on the ACT. Here are a few.

ACT Composite Score to Percentile Lookup Table

ACT Score

Composite Percentile

English Percentile

Math Percentile

Reading Percentile

Science Percentile

36

99

99

99

99

99

35

99

99

99

99

99

34

99

98

99

98

99

33

99

97

98

97

98

32

98

95

97

95

97

31

96

93

96

92

96

30

95

92

95

89

95

29

92

90

93

86

94

28

90

88

91

84

92

27

87

85

88

81

90

26

83

82

84

78

87

25

79

79

78

75

83

24

74

74

73

71

77

23

68

69

67

66

70

22

63

64

62

61

63

21

56

58

57

55

56

20

50

52

53

48

48

19

43

45

49

42

40

18

36

40

43

36

33

17

30

36

37

31

27

16

24

32

27

25

22

15

18

27

15

21

17

14

12

21

6

16

13

13

7

16

2

11

9

12

4

13

1

7

6

11

1

10

1

4

4

10

1

7

1

2

2

9

1

4

1

1

1

8

1

2

1

1

1

7

1

1

1

1

1

6

1

1

1

1

1

5

1

1

1

1

1

4

1

1

1

1

1

3

1

1

1

1

1

2

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

ACT Complete List of Score Percentiles

You can look up the complete, published list of ACT score percentiles published by the ACT here.